Okay, "we" is already a bit pretentious, since at least for now, there's just me. I'm a middle aged white guy, living in the Boston area, who used to be a teacher and school administrator, and who lately is channeling his inner engineer. I love wine--its variety, its depth, its charms.
I don't find all wine talk pretentious. After a while, things that seem that way at first often become less so: "barnyard" for instance turns out just to mean "it smells a bit like poop," and since poop is bad as smells go but barnyard really isn't--or isn't always--saying "barnyard" turns out to be nice shorthand that also avoids using the word "poop" in a context (say a nice dinner at a fancy restaurant) where that word isn't welcome.
At the same time, a lot of wine talk *is* pretentious. This is wine we are talking about. It's grape juice that got some yeast added to it, by accident at first and by design later on. I don't mean to diminish the skills of winemakers--the sometimes very considerable skills--but this is the most accessible alcoholic beverage in the world. Easy to make (though hard to make really, really well) easy to find, easy to enjoy, and just plain yummy.
So what you can expect to find here is a minimum of pretension and a maximum of prospective value. "Plonk" is a great French word, that almost conveys its meaning just in the sound. It's regular wine. It's the stuff that people put on their table night in and night out. It doesn't usually include the word "grand" anywhere on its label, except perhaps ironically. It's the stuff people run to the market to get to dump in a stew and keep a bit left to drink with it. You won't usually find celebrity chefs waxing rhapsodic about it, or telling a rambling, incoherent story about the night they broke down on the side of the road in Tuscany and the person who happened to stop and help turned out to be Mr. So-and-so (who, as all savvy viewers know) turned out to be the winemaker at Insider Vineyards, a place that producing 2.3 cases of wine a year and sells them for $18,000 a bottle, where the grapes are harvested by specially trained organic goats, who are fed an exclusive diet of grape skins, balsamico, and artisan parmesan.
Nope, plonk is just wine. Some of it is blah, some of it is plain, but some of it is really surprisingly good. These days, my budget very much runs to plonk, with only a very rare indulgence in a nicer bottle. And frankly, I like it that way. If you want to know all about wines that I can't afford or don't see the point in buying, I highly recommend Robert Parker as a resource. Wine Spectator is good, too, though there are a lot of people who see a correlation between advertising and rankings in WS. (I'm not one.) In all instances, however, I find the "100 point" scales used by most major publications silly to the point of dumb. If the lowest possible score is 70 (and 80 the effective lowest score, ebing the lowest ever actually used) then it's not a 100 point scale. And I defy you to define in a useful manner the actual difference between a wine that scores 94 and one that scores 95. Can't be done, except subjectively.
For you, what I'm offering is commentary on (mostly) plonk. I am defining that as in most cases under $10/bottle, retail. Given variations in regional pricing, as well as the nature of the tastings I attend, I may with semi-regularity include wines approaching $15, but only if they are exceptional values at the price point. I shop at a lot of stores, but two local ones in particular, where the prices seem pretty good, but can sometimes be beaten, so using their costs is probably a decent average price. I will list the regular price, even though I typically shop at the big tasting where a mixed case can garner a 20% discount. I'm going to try an initial scale of 5 points.
1: I drank it, and wanted to warn you against doing the same. (I won't post a lot of these.)
2: If it's the only wine available, sure, whatev.
3: "Tuesday night wine." Okay, it's not fabulous, but if you open it on a work night and don't finish it and it goes bad before the end of the bottle, well--Tuesday was enjoyable and you won't feel guilty about the unconsumed bits, at least for the money you spent.
4: Terrific, as far as plonk goes.
5: Priced like plonk, but drinks like something much pricier. Within the boundaries of this blog, exceptional wine.
You might have noticed above, where I said I'd been a teacher? So, perhaps there will be the odd plus or minus appended to the wines, but usually only as a means of saying, "these are both in the same category, but I preferred this one to that."
I like food, too, so you may get some food recommendations and even recipes from time to time. You might also get food pairing recommendations--or recommendations that some wines are better sipped and some better served with food. You can also reasonably expect that if I start telling you much about the region the wine is grown in, or the history of a particular grape, that I got the info by Googling it. Which is actually how a lot of the wine press makes its living, but they aren't usually very honest about it.
Look, wine is food, and done well it's basically yummy. So, enjoy yourself--pour a big glass of your favorite plonk, and let me know what you think.
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